A quarterly newsletter from the Botany Dept (NMNH) and the U.S. National Herbarium.

February 2014

02/28/2014

The inflorescence of Coespeletia palustris. (photo by Luis “Kike” Gámez)

A joint research initiative carried out by scientists from the Smithsonian Institution, Saint Louis University and the Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela, has resulted in the discovery of an exciting new species from the daisy family. Two expeditions in the paramos high up in the Venezuelan Andes were crowned by the discovery of the beautiful and extraordinary, Coespeletia palustris. The study was published in the open access journal Phytokeys.

The species of the genus Coespeletia are typical for high elevations and six of seven described species in total are endemic to the heights of the Venezuelan Andes; the seventh species comes from northern Colombia, but needs further revision according to the authors of the study. Most of the species are restricted to very high elevations, in a range between 3,800 - 4,800 meters. The specifics of such habitat are believed to be the reason behind the peculiar and unrepeated pollen characteristics of the genus.

02/26/2014

In 2013 the National Museum of Natural History’s Collections Program initiated a new initiative that provides funding for graduate students. The goal is to provide financial support to graduate students while at the same time achieving collections management goals, particularly the generation of new collections catalog (EMu) records. Funding is competitive. Proposals must be initiated by NMNH staff members who are advisors or co-advisors to the student that would benefit from the funding. Funding is not available to continue the student’s or advisor’s work; rather, these awards are to work on high priority collections condition or information projects that meet the museum’s needs while providing training and experience in curatorial techniques.

For the 2013-2014 academic year, Aleks Radosavljevic is working withVicki Funkto sort and digitize a large backlog of the unprocessed material left behind by José Cuatrecasas. At the time of his passing in 1996, the prolific Cuatrecasas had nearly 60 herbarium cases of partially processed plant material that he had (at one point or another in his long career) been actively working on. While the Department of Botany has made great progress in processing this material over the nearly two decades since his death, there are still over 7,000 specimens that need to be sorted, mounted and cataloged. These collections span the career of Cuatrecasas and, while they are primarily from the Andean regions of Colombia and Venezuela, they include a great diversity of plant families.

02/14/2014

The National Museum of Natural History presented the 2013 Peer Recognition Award to several members of the Department of Botany. Award recipients are individuals who have given their time and talent to the museum above and beyond what their job calls for and to those who have done something that makes a difference in the outside community, for the museum, or for the larger Smithsonian community. The Peer Recognition Award Committee is composed of 19 NMNH staff members representing a cross-section of the entire museum community.

02/13/2014

The Chicago Field Museum awarded its 2013 Parker/Gentry Award for Excellence and Innovation in Conservation/Environmental Biology to Department of Botany Curator and Research Scientist W. John Kress on November 14, 2013. Created in 1996, “the award honors an outstanding individual, team or organization whose efforts have had a significant impact on preserving the world’s rich natural heritage and whose actions can serve as a model to others.” The award is named after Theodore A. Parker III, an ornithologist, and Alwyn Gentry, a botanist, who were killed in August 3, 1993, when the light plane they were using to survey an Ecuadorian cloud forest crashed into a mountainside. The Field Museum established the award in their name and presents it annually.

02/11/2014

Robert B. Faden retired from the Smithsonian Institution in January 2014, after nearly 33 years as a curator in the Department of Botany and almost 40 years of federal service, including six years as a Peace Corps Volunteer. His work at the Smithsonian has focused on the evolution, systematics, floristics, reproductive biology, anatomy, and cytology of Commelinaceae, the dayflower family. Faden has described 57 new species and many infraspecific taxa of Commelinaceae in 12 genera, including 19 species each in Commelina and Aneilema. He has also described the new genus Plowmanianthus, named in honor of Faden’s former colleague at Field Museum Tim Plowman. The new species that Faden described have come from all five continents in which Commelinaceae occur naturally, but the large majority has been from Africa. Faden’s published floristic works include treatments of Commelinaceae for checklists for Gabon, Angola and Ecuador, and floras of North America, Costa Rica, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Somalia, Tropical East Africa, Southern Africa, and Sri Lanka. He has treated the Commelinaceae and pteridophytes for all three editions (1974, 1994 & 2013) of Upland Kenya Wild Flowers by A.D.Q. Agnew. His treatment of Commelinaceae for the Revised Handbook to the Flora of Ceylon (2000), which recognized three new species and several new infraspecific taxa, precipitated a gold rush by local botanists to discover new species in India, which is still ongoing. Faden has done field work in Mexico, Costa Rica, Thailand, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and numerous African countries ranging from Ghana to Somalia and South Africa. On many of his trips he has been accompanied by his wife Audrey Faden, after whom he named the new species Murdannia audreyae for a plant that she first spotted in Sri Lanka.

02/06/2014

Over the past couple of decades the Department of Botany has maintained a relatively stable staff, all working together for many years. On occasion, we have been able to add additional staff while even more have retired. A significant change began in 2011 when the Smithsonian Institution offered a buyout opportunity to staff who were thinking about retirement. Six staff in Botany retired in 2011 (see Plant Press 14(4): 3; 2011). Since research departments were able to replace these positions at a lower pay scale, the Department of Botany has embarked on staff succession planning. This plan called for eight positions in the department and included recruits for Research Scientists (Plant Press 16(3): 3; 2013), collections management (Plant Press 16(1): 4; 2013), and information technology (Plant Press 15(4): 4; 2012). Federal budget issues have slowed the completion of these hires and three more are currently on hold in collections management, IT support, and research/collections support, but should move forward to be filled in 2014.

02/03/2014

Ashley Egan joined the staff of the Department of Botany as Research Botanist and Assistant Curator of Legumes in August 2013.

Imagine starting a new job by going away on a three-month field excursion to the remote forests of China, Japan, and Thailand after only two weeks on the job, before having a chance to settle into your new office and unpack your boxes. Continue imagining that while you are away on your Asian expedition, you find out that your employer, the U.S. federal government, has shut down for 16 days, forcing you into “furlough in place” status (non-duty and non-pay). Such is the life of Ashley N. Egan, the Department of Botany’s new Research Botanist and Assistant Curator of Legumes.

Egan grew up in Idaho, spending her summers on the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park where she cultivated her love for nature. Her undergraduate studies were at Utah State University where she initially declared a major in Biological Engineering, and then switched to Biology and focused on population genetics. As an undergraduate, she volunteered in Paul G. Wolf’s laboratory, under the assistance of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Research Fellowship. She studied the genetic differentiation between populations of Erythronium grandiflorum (Liliaceae). Egan’s honor’s thesis focused on the resolution of inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers in Ipomopsis aggregata and I. tenuituba (Polemoniaceae).

After graduating in 1998 with a B.S. in Biology, she stayed in Utah working as a laboratory technician under Lynn Bohs at the University of Utah where her work focused on the Solanaceae family. Egan soon shifted her attention from population genetics to phylogenetics and systematics.